I had a sneaking suspicion this might happen, actually. I saw David Tom at a fan event in New York a few weeks ago, and he was being interviewed by someone, and I wondered if he might be about to pop up on some show or another. I hadn’t seen or evne thought about him for a good while before that.

This certainly is interesting news. Good luck to Billy Miller outside of daytime! I hope he does well. I think David Tom should be fine sliding back into the role of Billy. And I guess this is the end of people suggesting Y&R get Heather Tom back as Victoria!

Sure this is big news. This is Jill Faren Phelp’s way of trying to calm the impending doom. First, when any show makes head writing changes yearly, that’s usually a sign that the EP is difficult to appease. It’s also good foreshadowing that a show is soon to become a sinking ship. I have found the last 2 weeks of Y&R utterly boring. Even the storylines that are interesting (Delia’s death, Adam’s grief, Jack/Jill v. Victor, Nikki’s son) are filled with gaping holes as big as the grand canyon. My point – it’s hard to like the storylines that re-write history and make no sense character wise. There are many scenes where we scratch our heads wondering why someone would act a certain way.

David Tom is a capable actor, but he does not have the charisma or charm of Billy Miller (who, by the way, is my future husband). I was surprised to learn that Tom is actually a year older than Miller. Nonetheless, while David Tom can act and certainly was impressive during his previous stint as Billy Abbott – – this is not the same Billy Abbott. This is the adult version; a more responsible (albeit flawed) version of the character. Can Tom catch up or is he going to play angst and pouty to the hilt again?

I also have a hard time seeing Tom and Amelia Heinle together. She’s going to look like his mother as he still has that baby face.

With the loss of big names like Jeanne Cooper, Michelle Stafford and Billy Miller all within months of each other, I cannot help but wonder what JFP is going to do now to destroy everything I love about this show. I have noted that Sharon is being written with much more sympathy. Why? Bad Sharon is so much more fun than sappy “I can’t be without a man” Sharon.

I’m also tired of the cliches. How much money do I get if Nikki blurts out that Nick and Dylan are sons while Dylan and Nick argue at Nikki’s dinner, who, by the way, is taking her family to the GCAC for dinner to reveal that she had a baby and gave it up for adoption. Who does this in public? Also, people who have lost their children don’t usually go out in public a lot following the passing of their child because they get tired of all the sympathy and looks from other people. But not this show. They paraded Chloe around like she was on a shopping spree, but would throw in lines like “I’m tired of people looking at me.” THEN STAY HOME HONEY.

Don’t get me started on Noah who went from musiciain to bartender to photographer to business executive within a matter of weeks. It’s borderline personality disorder and his career decisions make my head spin, but I am well aware that this was an engineered move by the writers to set up the next generation of the Abbott/Newman feud which really makes less and less sense each time one of them marries into the other’s family. I mean, give me a break. When Summer was revealed to be an Abbott, you would have thought the world was going to end with all the Newman vs. Abbott talk. It’s ridiculous considering Abby and Johnny are both Abbott/Newman children, Billy and Victoria are married, Nikki was married to Jack twice, Jack helped raise Nicholas and later wed Sharon and was step-father to Noah, Phyllis has married into both families as has Brad and Cole, Victor was married to Ashley twice, Traci gave Victor Colleen’s heart (he was also Colleen’s godfather), Kyle was Victor’s step-son. I wish they would just call it what it is – a feud between Jack and Victor and leave the last names out of it because it’s nothing more than manufactured nonsense to try and sway the viewer into beileving there is much more going on. I am too smart to appreciate this kind of storytelling.

I am also not interested in Fen and Michael in prison because Fen belongs in prison. I also hate that I had to agree with The Bug when she pointed that out to Michael that Fen was at the root of Michael and Lauren’s problems. I am also not intersted in a cliched drug storyline that will likely make as much sense as Belinda Rogan’s murder storyline did last year (or Diane’s or Skyes, take your pick).

Devon the billionaire is a waste of time. Devon has never been a front and center character for this show so for the writers to give him $2 billion is simply a waste of good drama. Katherine’s money could have been used to really create a stir – not just build a park (where people eat dinner in the freezing cold and have long chats with themselves in the middle of the night). Has anyone heard of rapists or muggers in Genoa City? I’m not buying that.

There is way too much to continue on with because it depresses me that this show that had such great potential has just gotten 10x worse over the last 3 weeks. But they remain #1 because just when things get bad, JFP will kill a kid or burn down a building. Remember event storytelling that went over so well in the 1990s and 2000s? I guess JFP wants that type of show again. I say good luck to you because the shows that went that route in the 1990s and 2000s are now gone.

^^ You make so many good points, Pujolsfan. I am not sure that JFP is fully to blame though. I thought, and still do think for that matter, that her style could work at Y&R, but her theatrics need to be balanced by a HW who can bring more depth than the current regime.

As for Amelia Heinle looking too old for David Tom, it’s ironic because Heinle was being considered for the role of Mackenzie Browning when she was hired. David Tom was long gone by then, but it’s still ironic. Though, as an aside, I must say that the fact that TPTB (or the powers that ‘were’ at the time) were considering the same group of actresses for Mac as for Victoria is absurd.

I thought that bit of casting news was interesting. You’re right, Victoria and Mac were NEVER supposed to be the same age. In fact, Victoria was 16 when Tom first started in the role in 1991, right? Wouldn’t that make Victoria 38? Billy and Mac would be around 32ish if you use the ages of the characters when they were rapidly aged. It makes you wonder about the people they hire to run these shows. I think most of them are hacks who probably have inside connections to get the job. That’s not to say that they don’t work, it just means that the product they work for sucks and they aren’t talented enough to make it better. This is 2013. There are still way too many soap cliches used. The way people watch television – and what they watch (obviously, heads of Daytime TV have not gotten the message).

Also – what’s wrong with characters commenting to the cameras about what’s going on and what they’re thinking. It would bring a great deal of style and humor to daytime serials if they made fun of themselves or paid homage to the reality television shows. It’s also time that the writing improved. I know it’s gruely coming up with storylines to fill an hour long drama every weekday for 52 weeks, but that can be changed if the networks changed the way they programmed the shows. Why not either make them 30 minute shows or only air them three days a week. CBS could air Y&R one day and B&B the next.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to limit the amount of time we can see our favorite soaps, I’m only trying to think of a solution to the problem. In reality, however, we do know that daytime soaps can thrive as one-hour shows 5-days per week 52 weeks per year. It’s been done before, so it can be done again. It just takes someone with a little bit of genuis to figure out a way to make these shows better so that more people watch them.

First and foremost, the writing has to improve. Does anyone remember Guiding Light in the early 1990s? That show was on fire. Each character had something to do and the plots were interwoven. That’s because a TEAM of head writers wrote for that show, and it’s obvious that a group of talented people are more likely to come up with intersting storylines. The storylines also need to have more of a twist – – it’s being done all over primtime. It’s just time for daytime to catch up and reveal a true shocker somewhere. Days of Our Lives has been trying and General Hospital has put forth the effort. B&B is always the same old song and dance and Y&R has gone from mediocre to unwatchable. There’s no effort on Y&R to put forth a forward sense of thinking and it’s what has to be done.

It’s funny that were considering the same actresses for Mac and Victoria, and I agree, absurd. But Amelia Heinle feels much more like a Mac than a Victoria, even if she’s a little old for the part.

I appreciate everything you’re saying, Pujolsfan, but I’m not sure how much improving the writing of these shows will even help. Ratings hardly seem tied to quality at all, with the two shows that are making a real effort to be creative and push things consistently coming in behind CBS’s two soaps that seem to be, at their best, doing the same old thing that seems to work and at times just going off the rails. But you’re right, something ridiculous like Marlena and Hope flipping over tables and pulling out each other’s weave probably would get people to tune in in the short term, which is a real shame. Most people don’t have the attention span for soaps these days. The evidence of that is in a lot of the soapier, twistier primetime shows, where storylines happen in fairly discreet units and for the most part the events of the previous unit are forgotten when you get to the next one. Even these shows are often not trying to build something up for six months to a year, but playing things out over a few weeks, processing the major effects, and then moving into the next phase.

This all seems a little like a moot point, though. Like them or not, the remaining soaps overall are doing relatively well ratings wise, compared to a couple of years ago.